Narrative and Self-Understanding, (Hardcover)

This exciting new edited collection bridges the gap between narrative and self-understanding. The problem of self-knowledge is of universal interest; the nature or character of its achievement has been one continuing thread in our philosophical tradition for millennia. Likewise the nature of storytelling, the assembly of individual parts of a potential story into a coherent narrative structure, has been central to the study of literature. But how do we gain knowledge from an artform that is by definition fictional, by definition not a matter of ascertained fact, as this applies to the understanding of our lives? When we see ourselves in the mimetic mirror of literature, what we see may not just be a matter of identifying with a single protagonist, but also a matter of recognizing long-form structures, long-arc narrative shapes that give a place to - and thus make sense of - the individual bits of experience that we place into those structures.But of course at precisely this juncture a question arises: do we <i>make </i>that sense, or do we <i>discover</i> it? The twelve chapters brought together here lucidly and steadily reveal how the matters at hand are far more intricate and interesting than any such dichotomy could accommodate. This is a book that investigates the ways in which life and literature speak to each other. <br>

• Narrative and Self-Understanding, (Hardcover)
• Author: Palgrave MacMillan
• ISBN: 9783030282882
• Format: Hardcover
• Publication Date: 2019-11-26
• Page Count: 274